Try Me (Extracurricular Activities #2)

by Neve Wilder

Chet was as sleek and swift as a fin cutting through midnight water.

Since he wasn’t looking at me, I gazed my fill, drinking in the dark ends of his hair that went wayward near his temple and scythed across his sharp cheekbones. He used to have the same haircut I did, the one I’d basically had my entire life: trimmed on the sides, a little loose on the top, but neat. It shouldn’t have bothered me that I couldn’t remember when he changed the style. But it did.

The silver ring piercing one of them glinted. He had a hoop through his nose, too, both of which he removed for games.

We’d been tight once, and we weren’t now, and there were plenty of bullshit family politics that forged that divided path,

My muscles were wires, and every place where our skin touched wound me tighter.

Our breaths went rough, and a weird but organic sense of inevitability descended, like we were picking up at some unknown point we’d left off on previously that I had no memory of. Had it always been there, lying in wait?

My gaze had landed on him like lightning drawn to the lone tree in a field, complete with a concurrent crackle of electricity that arced through me.

I didn’t want Chet in this house. It’d taken me long enough to manage walking into my bedroom at home without seeing him twisting in the sheets, hearing the echo of his moan as he came all over my fist.

He also had denim-blue eyes and the kind of American-pie smile that old ladies cooed at and younger ones dropped their panties for. I’d always liked it aimed in my direction.

How, for one brief second, our gazes had connected in the rearview mirror and it set off a shower of sparks in my chest. Mark had felt it, too, I was certain.

My impulse control had clearly taken the night off, and he’d always been the biggest test of it.

Mark Farrow, the boy I’d crushed on before I even knew what a crush was. The first guy I’d ever jacked off to. The first guy I’d ever wanted to kiss. The first guy who’d ever touched me exactly the fucking way I’d wanted to be touched. The only guy I could never have.

We both should’ve been over it. I was starting to get the idea neither of us were.

I wanted to hate him. I’d wanted to for years. Even now I couldn’t manage it. This was as close as I could get.

I wondered if he kissed the way he walked. If that swagger reached those full fucking lips, and how easily they’d give beneath mine. I wondered what he tasted like.

“Hold on, I’m processing, but we’re gonna need to back the fuck up. Threesome. Jesus fucking Christ. Like the three of you. Cam, Mark, Chet.” He made a complicated gesture with his hands, trying to jigsaw his fingers together and that, combined with the expression on his face, had me biting back a laugh, because from the shit I’d overheard between him and Eric when they’d still been my roommates, they were freaky as fuck. And yet somehow he was still capable of seeming totally naïve sometimes.

But the invitation that night gave me the idea a hell of a lot more had been going on in Cam’s life than he’d let on. I never found out, though, because he’d started keeping me at arm’s length after that. “And like a month later he OD’d.

Nate cocked his head, and then his mouth fell open again. “Hold the fuck up. Hold. The. Fuck. Up. This isn’t even about Cam, then, is it, because the common factor here isn’t Cam.” He gazed down his nose at me. “It’s Chet Pynchon.”

I’d been a fucking wreck both because I’d been the one to discover Cam in that state and because of the way Cam’s parents had treated me like I was diseased and then summarily dismissed me.

“Are there twelve-step recovery programs for my kind?” Nate cracked a smile. “Looks like step one got stamped on your cheek in purple and blue the other night.”